Pirate Party fights back against court-ordered blockade of file-sharing sites.

Share this story

Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet's DNS servers should enable access.

A few days ago, TorrentFreak reported that the Oslo District Court had sided with several Hollywood studios and domestic Norwegian rights holders in a case that sought to block a number of sites, including The Pirate Bay, Viooz, and ExtraTorrent. The court ordered that the country's major ISPs, including Telenor, TeliaSonera, NextGenTel, and Altibox, must block the sites.

The Norwegian Pirate Party, as you can probably imagine, isn't happy with the court-ordered block. In response, it has set up an unblocked DNS server—dns.piratpartiet.no—and a website that shows you how to change your DNS server settings on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

The Party's co-chairman, Øystein Middelthun, gave TorrentFreak some choice sound bites about the manoeuvre, too. "We want a free and open Internet for everyone," Middelthun said. "The copyright industry’s fight for control over culture has put us in a situation where this is no longer the case in Norway."

He continued: "The blocking order is yet another sad step down the road towards the dystopic world imagined by George Orwell ... the dangerous thing about it is that it sets a precedent. It is easy to imagine how the scope could be expanded to include other websites somehow considered immoral, and while the current technical implementation is easy to circumvent, hardening it is equally easy once society has accepted censorship in the first place."

Further Reading

The UK Pirate Party tried to do something similar in the UK a few years ago, by offering a proxy service that bypassed a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay. The proxy wasn't online for very long, however: facing a costly legal battle with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK Pirate Party decided it was "financially impossible" to keep the service running and pulled the plug.

The Norwegian Pirate Party, for its part, is confident that its DNS server will stick around: "Running a public DNS service is fully legal, so we do not expect any legal trouble," Middelthun said.

Other alternative DNS providers, such as OpenDNS and Google Public DNS, both appear to bypass DNS-based website blockades as well.

Share this story

Sebastian Anthony
Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited. Emailsebastian@arstechnica.co.uk//Twitter@mrseb